Try again, Clarence

Per a New York Times article headlined, "Justice Thomas Says He Was Advised Lavish Gifts Did Not Need to Be Reported":

Justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday that he had followed the advice of “colleagues and others in the judiciary” when he did not disclose lavish gifts and travel from a wealthy conservative donor.

In a statement released by the Supreme Court, the justice said he believed he was not required to report the trips.

“Early in my tenure at the court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the court, was not reportable." ...

What kinds of gifts and travel are we talking about?

ProPublica revealed on Thursday that the justice had traveled by private jet and yacht at the invitation of Harlan Crow, a Texas real estate billionaire. The vacations, which took place over nearly two decades, included trips to Indonesia and to Bohemian Grove, an exclusive retreat nestled in the redwoods in Northern California.

I had seen the ProPublica headline but couldn't bring myself to read the piece. Clarence and Ginny Thomas so disdain public opinion, and are so immune to public pressure, that I figured, why bother raising my blood pressure to no good purpose?

However, Clarence's "they told me it was okay" excuse takes his contempt for public opinion and the public's intelligence to new depths.

Clarence, you know damned well that flying on a private jet isn't like being treated to dinner at Applebee's. That you can't be bothered to muster even the smallest amount of shame for your failure to disclose — that you expect us to swallow the rank excrement of "but 'they' told me it was okay" — is despicable. You have benefited from your past and present colleagues' indifference to the institution's reputation, a reputation which, thanks in no small part to you and your wife, is deservedly in the toilet.

In short, Clarence, you're full of it.

You've pledged to comply with new disclosure guidelines adopted last month. If you do, better late than never. However, I'm betting you'll still find ways to skirt the intention of those guidelines. After all, neither you nor Ginny loves being treated like the little people who have to follow the rules, do you?

How will we remember this era?

I've been reading a bit about how discredited causes are remembered. Specifically, I had my eyes opened by Susan Neiman's simultaneously scholarly and deeply personal 2019 book, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.

Neiman compares how Germany has gone about confronting its Nazi past with how the United States has confronted the legacy of slavery. The comparison turns out to be a good deal more complicated than most of us would like, certainly the "most of us" who like to believe we're on the "right" side of history. To be an admirer of Hitler today is monstrous, no question. Yet to say that Germany has successfully grappled with Nazism and its legacy is ... well, contentious. Not all Germans believe that, and the skeptics have compelling reasons for their doubt.

Yet if Germany has had a difficult time looking itself in the mirror, the United States largely has kept its eyes closed, at least until recently.

Neiman observes that much of this country's problem grappling with the legacy of slavery arises from its refusal to examine a good century of its history, namely, the period between the end of the Civil War and the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. When skeptics of systemic racism complain that slavery ended over a century ago, they take advantage of popular ignorance of Reconstruction and its backlash, the so-called "Jim Crow" era. Some historians contend that the latter era's brutality, which included lynching and mass murder, merits a more brutally honest name, like "neoslavery". I can't argue with them. To paraphrase an observation made by Martin Luther King, Jr., chattel slavery ended in 1865 but African Americans weren't truly freed for another century. If more of us understood the truth of neoslavery, how thoroughly it ground AFrican Americans down under a web of legalized terror and economic exploitation, we'd give short shrift to the willfully obtuse argument that "slavery ended over a century ago and we should move on".

So both Germany and the United States still have work to do, coming to terms with the horrific legacies of their pasts. The United States has a lot farther to go in its own journey than Germany, though.

With all that in mind, I wonder: what will our descendants a century hence make of this era's legacy? (I'm limiting myself to considering the United States from here on.)

In our time we've seen a good forty percent of the country (the actual number varies depending on context but forty percent seems to be a good overall estimate) descend into political madness. There is no other way to characterize the reactionary (not conservative) embrace of the corrupt, cartoonishly dishonest, and venemous Donald Trump. Just this week, he reasserted his dominance over his would-be challengers for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — by being indicted in New York State.

The sheer number of verified and verifiable lies that Trump has told since he announced his candidacy in 2015 utterly disqualifies him as an authoritative or trustworthy source of information about anything. Yet millions of otherwise sane Americans repeat his assertions — echoed and embellished by far-right media and social media — with absolute confidence.

At one time I believed they were doing so purely out of spite, as a rhetorical middle finger to those of us who still have some trust in the mainstream media and, more broadly, in expertise and truth. Yet the vast majority of those millions have put their money and their health where their mouths are. They have repudiated the consensus of the medical and public-health communities that the vaccines against CoViD-19 are safe, and have refused to be vaccinated. They have done so because Trump, among others, has assailed the vaccines as toxic, or as sinister vectors for mind control.

It's worth remembering that (1) Trump himself got vaccinated, though he did his best to conceal that fact, and (2) Trump at least nominally presided over Operation Warp Speed, the government project that led to the vaccines' development. Yet millions of Trump's followers have repudiated the vaccines anyway.

To trust a compulsive liar — one who doesn't even follow his own (bad) advice — does not make sense. It makes no sense to me, and it won't make any sense to our descendants a century from now.

I remember the horror of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in which hundreds of cultists committed suicide at the direction of the cult's leader. That was my first brush with what I've since discovered is a real vulnerability in the human psyche, one that explains adherence to horrific ideas not just by hundreds, but by millions. Sometimes the right — or rather, wrong — person comes along, able to convince a lot of people that they should put their complete trust in him. (It's almost always a man.)

Forty-five years on, we still don't have much of a handle on how cult leader Jim Jones gained his hold over his followers. I wonder if, a century from now, science will be able to explain that, or the power of our own time's literal cult hero, Trump.

Or will our descendants a century from now still struggle against the enduring, toxic legacy of the delusions Trump and likeminded allies have spread? Will his deluded message live on in a new "Lost Cause" narrative, perhaps fused with the old one that is one of the Confederacy's most evil legacies ("evil" because it tries to deny historical truth)?

Burying the Randian fantasy

I don't know if Ayn Rand's overwrought and overlong works still command respect anywhere but if they do, it's because her acolytes haven't been willing to look at the U.S. lately. And by "lately", I mean the last six or seven years.

In that time a self-proclaimed billionaire skillfully fed and rode a wave of nativism and racism into the U.S. presidency, while a verified billionaire impulsively offered to buy one of the highest-profile social media platforms, then was compelled by the courts to follow through on the offer even though he had a ton of buyer's remorse.

Rand in Atlas Shrugged envisioned the rich industrialists of her time losing patience with the deadweight they supported through their taxes and their factories. They would wall themselves off in their own little enclave where their work ethic would let them achieve greatness while the rest of the world went to hell. The message: the productive — as reflected by wealth — should be allowed to do as they pleased; only thus would paradise be achieved.

"President" Donald Trump — the quotation marks signify his all but total abdication of the responsibilities of the office, even as he availed himself of its privileges and powers — achieved exactly three things in office. He enabled the Republican-controlled Senate's installation of many federal judges; he enabled a Republican Congress' enacting of a massive tax cut whose benefits went overwhelmingly to the wealthy; and he somehow managed to oversee the creation of Operation Warp Speed, bringing us vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in hitherto unimaginably short time. I doubt he had any significant involvement in any of these things but he signed off on them, which was all that was legally required and all he was fit to do. Otherwise, his administration and he personally were mired in corruption, mismanagement, and lies from the moment he took office. His reelection bid was repudiated by the voting public. However, his post-presidency finds him wielding a massive segment of the population, actively hostile to institutions and facts and given to cult-like worship of him, like a rusty scalpel, infecting the country with toxic divisiveness and disinformation, corroding the foundations of democracy itself.

That's what happened when we let a rich man occupy the presidency: he remade our society for the worse.

However, Trump inherited his wealth and arguably has accomplished nothing in his life except becoming a savvy marketer of his family name. He isn't a rugged, no-nonsense industrialist of the sort Rand lionized; he didn't build anything from his own genius and turn it into a massively successful business. Rand would probably have consigned him to the bleating, unworthy masses exiled from her utopia of builders.

Elon Musk, on the surface, is different. He didn't inherit his money, he made it by running companies like PayPal and Tesla. He's reputed to be a smart man. (No one who has ever worked for or with Trump would say that about him.) His companies have created products that millions use; indeed, PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX can be said to have revolutionized their industries. (Trump's businesses have made nothing. Well, they've made him rich.)

Yet Musk isn't a great boss, by all accounts. He can be inspirational, yes, but he can be abusive almost to the point of illegality, too.

He also shares with Trump an apparently bottomless need for ego-stroking, a surprisingly thin skin, and a penchant for punishing his supposed enemies, including by turning his fanatical supporters against them. Musk's and Trump's thin skins also don't stop them from cruelly taunting others; apparently neither has ever heard the aphorism not to dish it out if you can't take it. (They're also comfortable with accommodating racism to a degree I find despicable but for this analysis that's a tangent.)

So it's no surprise to find that Musk, now sole proprietor of Twitter, is using his unfettered power there to reshape it in his image. His latest stunt (after he cashiered or drove off more than half the company's labor force and reinstated notorious trolls and disseminators of disinformation like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene) was to suspend the accounts of those who crossed him in some way. They included an account that reported the location of his private jet and accounts belonging to journalists who have been critical of him at times.

As of today he has reinstated some but not all of them based on one of his silly Twitter polls. "The people have spoken", he wrote, as if he were just "the people's" instrument.

That's how the man who was once the world's richest is spending his days. It's not exactly the kind of hard, creative, world-improving work Rand envisioned. Nothing Musk is doing at Twitter looks like it will encourage the kind of free speech that improves society. Rather, he's encouraging humanity's vilest instincts while trying to monetize the hell out of the company while he can.

Rand, I suspect, wouldn't have minded Trump's assault on democracy. I think she had authoritarian instincts and disdained "the people"; certainly she didn't think they should run things.

However, she would be embarrassed by how petty and self-sabotaging Trump and Musk are. They aren't the avatars of human progress she made out society's wealthiest to be. They're just extraordinarily flawed men (unusually devoid of empathy, by the way, rather like I imagine Rand was) who lucked into wealth (Elon didn't found his most successful companies, remember) and used that wealth to accumulate power. What they did with that power has been disastrous not just for "the people" Rand disdained, but more importantly, for themselves. Trump invited unprecedented scrutiny of his finances, scrutiny he'd avoided before his foray into politics. (He has always been a scofflaw but before 2015 regulators and the public largely didn't care.) Musk has seen his wealth, concentrated in Tesla stock, evaporate as the stock has been hammered since his takeover of Twitter.

These two rich men were given a lot of power. They have used it so badly that most of us would rather they just went away.

Ayn Rand's paradise run by rich people is as unserious a fantasy as any ever written. The trouble is, a lot of people who take themselves seriously, like former Congresscritter Paul Ryan, take her fantasy seriously, too.

Well, we tried it in the real world, and it has been a catastrophe. Time for even true believers to give it up and consign Rand to history's landfill.

The limits of startup culture

Elon Musk has only owned Twitter for two weeks. Given his spectacular success at Tesla and SpaceX, I'd be a fool to count him or Twitter out over the long haul. I loathe his public persona and what I know of his management methods but he has made both work for him at a business level.

Nevertheless, what he has done to and with Twitter in his two-week ownership stint is kind of sublimely moronic.

Anybody can have an idea to whose shortcomings he's blind. That's why most of us chew over the idea for a while, and/or discuss it with others, before we throw ourselves into making it happen.

When you're the world's richest man, though, and you own a business outright, you can put your pet uncooked idea into effect with a snap of your fingers. Constantly being hailed online as a genius also apparently dulls your sense of caution, the hard-won knowledge the rest of us have that we can and will make mistakes when we move too fast and don't think clearly enough.

"Move fast and break things" is a motto credited to Mark Zuckerberg. It's a natural follow-on to another risk-taking motto, "It's better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission". I've worked in bureaucracies and I get the appeal of both ideas.

I can also say, I've worked in bureaucracies and I've had to clean up after brash idiots who broke things they didn't understand and therefore weren't competent to fix when the breakage caused others to suffer.

Musk, like so many tech bros, is infatuated with himself and the "obvious" correctness of his own vision. What's worse, he has a proven track record of achievements and a cheering section that I can only call terrifyingly loyal. (His online supporters act like a bully's henchmen.)

Tech bro-dom is way, way, way overestimated as an expression of genius, especially by the bros. What's far worse, though, is that its culture elevates not giving a shit about other people to practically a holy commandment.

What Musk has demonstrated in his brief stint as Twitter's sole proprietor is the limit of startup culture, of tech bro-dom, as an operating philosophy. He can move fast and break things but he can't force everyone to stay in the building while he whacks at the foundations.

He has tried, to be sure, threatening to "name and shame" advertisers who have "paused" their advertising on Twitter until the long-term picture becomes clearer. That doesn't mean he'll get them all back on board, though. His pettiness isn't charming and it isn't a desirable trait in a CEO or business owner. Arrogance, which he also has in immeasurable quantity, isn't well-tolerated either, unless it's crowned with success.

If Twitter doesn't regain its footing under Musk, it will be because of his shortcomings as a manager and as a human being.

Latest question for Judge Cannon

Judge Aileen Cannon denied DOJ's request to exempt the classified documents DOJ identified in the materials removed from Mar-a-Lago from review by the special master.

Judge Cannon, in this latest decision you explicitly declared that Donald Trump is more trustworthy in your eyes than the Department of Justice. You prefer to believe Trump's uncorroborated and flatly nonsensical assertions that the documents in question could be unclassified, rather than the expert judgment of DOJ and FBI staffers that the documents are classified.

You're willing to let not only the special master you just appointed review these documents (which has no precedent because it's a terrible idea), but Trump's attorneys as well. Trump's attorneys, who, last I checked, did not have security clearances at all, much less clearances at the extraordinarily high levels that would be needed to review these documents if they were government workers.

So here's my question to you, Judge Cannon:

Why the fuck are you endangering our national security by granting access to even potentially highly sensitive documents to whoever the fuck Trump hires as his latest legal representative?

Actually, I have a second question which might be even more important:

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Here's where you stand. You are so fucking indifferent to national security that you're okay with obliging Trump far beyond the ethics of your profession. (Admittedly it's a profession to which you're extremely new, but you're not that new to it.) You're also playing fast and loose with information so sensitive, it led to an ongoing damage assessment.

The people who worry about national security are uniformly scared about what might have happened. Yet you aren't.

So again, what the fuck is wrong with you?

You're not just a Trump toady any more. You're now a threat to our national security — because you're so fucking willing to middle-finger the government, just to show your patron that your priority is what he wants rather than justice.

Judge Cannon erred

Judge Aileen Cannon unexpectedly threw a wrench into the Justice Department's criminal investigation of Donald Trump by ordering the appointment of a special master to sift through the documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022.

I went over the sequence of events that led up to the FBI's execution of a search warrant that day. Surprisingly, further revelations on an almost daily basis since then have not contradicted that basic timeline. Rather, they've only deepened the public's understanding of the reasons the Justice Department was driven to the extraordinary step of seeking a warrant against a former president of the United States.

An indisputable, well-documented fact at the heart of the investigation is, Trump repeatedly lied. He lied first to the National Archives and Records Administration, then to DOJ, by pretending on multiple occasions to comply with each organization's requests for the return of all documents that by law belong to the government, not to him. That's why DOJ had to keep returning to Mar-a-Lago and on each visit found more documents he illegally retained.

Trump has kept lying to the public, claiming variously that he declassified documents automatically (a claim all but two of his advisers will not substantiate and which, in any case, is not borne out by the documents themselves, which bear none of the legally required marks indicating they've been properly declassified) or simply that the documents rightly belong to him.

That latter claim is, to repeat, a lie. Nearly every document a president touches during his time in office is the property of the U.S. government. That's because the president is not a king, he is a public servant, like every other elected official, and what his administration produces belongs to the people.

Trump's lies have been in service of delegitimizing DOJ's criminal investigation of his mishandling of these illegally held documents. Now Judge Cannon has supported Trump's subversive campaign with her indefensible order.

She spends pages emphasizing that an ex-president is not a typical target of a criminal investigation, solemnly invoking the need to bend over backwards to ensure the appearance of justice in pursuing such an atypical target. She all but accuses the Justice Department of misconduct and treats Trump as a respectable figure for whom "reputational damage" looms large.

Her concern for his reputation is laughable. Remember, the world first learned of the FBI's 8 August entry to Mar-a-Lago from Donald Trump. He, not DOJ, attracted all the public attention.

However, that's a relatively minor defect of Cannon's bonkers decision. The much bigger problem with her order is that she bends over backwards to treat Trump with overweening deference neither he nor any ex-president deserves — certainly not when the ex-president has exhibited the bad faith Trump has.

The facts are clear. NARA and then DOJ did their level best to get Trump to comply with the law voluntarily and without undue publicity. He illegally kept hundreds of documents despite multiple attempts to gain his voluntary cooperation. Some of those documents seem to have been incredibly sensitive and their disclosure to other nations could be incredibly damaging to national security.

Judge Cannon's order disregards these outrageous and undisputed facts in favor of protecting hypothetical "rights" or "privileges" of an ex-president that the law does not recognize.

Judge Cannon doesn't state a single reason why an ex-president might legitimately claim "executive privilege" (which is understood to be the province of the current president, consistent with the idea that the privilege belongs to the office, not to its occupants individually). She merely asserts that such a claim might exist.

I can claim dragons might exist. For that to mean anything to you, though, you'd expect me to explain why. Since Judge Cannon can't be bothered to explain herself, the rest of us need not give her assertion any credence.

Even if we did, why should we deem that possibility more important than the possibility that Trump was engaged in criminal misconduct? That's exactly what Cannon does, in defiance of the balance of evidence for each — a lot of evidence for criminal misconduct, no evidence that anything Trump illegally retained somehow "belongs" to him rather than to the presidency by virtue of an unexplained "executive privilege" belonging to an ex-president.

Cannon also prioritizes the attorney-client privilege of a criminal investigation's presumed target above the national security of the United States, by putting the evidence the Office of the Director of National Intelligence needs to conduct its damage assessment in the hands of a special master. How can she expect the ODNI to share control of evidence with a third party whose mission is to remove any items from that evidence that the third party deems improperly seized? If the ODNI deems an item crucial to its damage assessment, can the special master nevertheless remove it from consideration by returning it to Trump? (Cannon's order is silent on any such conflict.) Moreover, according to a former general counsel for the FBI, the ODNI damage assessment requires assistance from the very DOJ and FBI officials whom the order forbids to review the evidence pending the completion of the special master's work!

Speaking of the special master, Judge Cannon's order totally disregards the extraordinary difficulty of finding suitable candidates. The special master in this case must be expert not just in attorney-client privilege but in executive privilege, and must have the highest security clearances or be qualified to receive them where they can only be given on a discretionary basis. Judge Cannon's disregard of the difficulty of finding a special master with these qualifications is a dereliction of her duty to safeguard the government's, and thus the public's, rights.

(By the way, that "attorney-client privilege" business raises an awkward question: why would Trump have so much attorney work product at his residence? Moreover, why would that attorney work product be intermingled with "souvenirs" from his presidency? I find it hard to believe either is normal, even for an ex-president.)

Finally, Judge Cannon suggests that both DOJ and the FBI treated Trump disrespectfully. She was bothered by the fact that the FBI allegedly seized items that it should not have, items of an indisputably personal nature. (The best-known were a couple of Trump's passports.) My understanding is that seizing items not actually covered by a search warrant is not unheard of while executing one; the mistakes are understood to have been made in good faith unless there's clear evidence of misconduct. Trump has not provided a scintilla of evidence that any misconduct occurred. By all appearances he was treated like any other investigative target, no better and no worse.

Trump was told precisely what he should not have kept from his time in office. He had ample time in which to sort those items out from his personal possessions: after all, he (illegally) had those materials for over eighteen months! If, when the FBI executed its search warrant, his personal possessions were still intermingled with those illegally retained materials (and were thus subject to seizure by the terms of the search warrant, an awkward fact Trump ignores), whose fault is that?

Judge Cannon's order rewards Trump for being a slob and a hoarder and for disregarding the plain terms of communications from NARA and DOJ, while it simultaneously ignores the terrifying danger to our national security that his disregard for the law and proper security presented (and may still present if he has more documents, or copies of the ones already removed).

Her order also rewards Trump's amply-demonstrated bad faith during this saga by treating him as if he presented clean hands and honest assertions. Indeed, her order is so inexplicably deferential to him and so heedless of his demonstrated misconduct that it calls into question her own faithfulness to the oath she took when she became a federal judge.

Without a signed confession, I can't say Judge Cannon's a zealot who was determined from the start to favor Trump no matter what. What I can say is, she erred. She erred egregiously, and to her everlasting discredit as a jurist.

[EDITED: I toned down the likely exaggeration of "thousands" of documents and "many" of them being sensitive. I also word-smithed other spots and added a citation for my assertion that the ODNI's assessment needs DOJ assistance.]

Trump, the national security threat

Donald Trump illegally kept records from his time as president.

Worse, after the National Archives discovered his illegal retention and he was asked nicely to hand the records over, he turned over some but not all of them. He could and should have turned over everything, but he didn't.

He has no defense for illegally retaining records. He has no defense for failing to comply in full with the Archives' polite request.

What he has is a manifest pattern of disregarding his obligations under the law.

The Department of Justice learned he still illegally held records and, understandably, the department could have little confidence he would comply fully with another "request". The only way to ensure that the records made their way back to their legally authorized custodians was for the federal government to take charge of the work.

The government first had to get permission from a federal judge. No federal judge will be eager to authorize a warrant for the FBI to enter the home of a former president. The government has to provide a hell of a good reason, or reasons. Evidently, it did.

That's the backstory for the FBI entering Mar-a-Lago under the terms of a search warrant.

In response to the FBI search (and resulting seizure of multiple boxes of documents), Trump has claimed either that he declassified any or all of the classified records he held or that there was no need for FBI agents to barge in and search, he would have been happy to comply with a request.

Trump's claims are nonsensical.

First, I very much doubt that declassifying something automatically and by itself gives even an ex-president the right to keep it. There are all kinds of unclassified records to which a private citizen has no right of access. As a private citizen an ex-president ought to have no right to have someone else's FBI file or Social Security number, for instance. So even if everything he held was declassified, he still almost certainly didn't have a right to keep it all.

Second, declassification doesn't just happen with a snap of a president's finger. As Asha Rangappa, Norman L. Eisen, and Bradley P. Moss explain in a detailed and careful piece for Just Security, declassification only takes effect after a careful and deliberate process:

If Trump did in fact order the declassification, he still needed to make sure his staff took the necessary next steps to modify the classification markings on the documents before he could actually handle and store the records (as a private citizen) as if they were unclassified. Under security classification rules, a classification marking on a document has to be treated as valid and binding unless and until a subsequent marking replaces it. Appropriate government staffers would have needed to cross out the classification markings in the headers and footers, and stamped “declassified” on the record noting when it was declassified, by whom and under what authority. Since that does not appear to have been done with the classified documents reportedly identified to date, the documents remain classified and had to be treated as classified for handling and storage purposes.

No matter what Trump claims, if the documents he held didn't go through the process described above, the documents remained classified. If they remained classified, he had no legal right to hold them since he is no longer president. (Even while president it would have been illegal to hold those records at Mar-a-Lago unless the resort had the right secure facilities. It's not clear that Mar-a-Lago did.)

As for Trump's plaint that all anyone had to do was to ask for the records the FBI found and seized, he doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

No honest, patriotic, and law-abiding person who attains the presidency will leave office believing he or she has a right to the records that cross the Resolute Desk; legal counsel will make clear that the law prohibits that. At most, one might imagine that personal notes of no consequence to the nation could be retained, and even that decision would have to be vetted by qualified experts.

Trump didn't hold onto just a couple of notes with sentimental value, either. The first round of records recovery from Mar-a-Lago in January netted fifteen boxes of documents. He showed no sense of responsibility, no sense of his obligation to the country by holding onto so much material he knew he had to right to keep.

It turned out that wasn't even all the material he had. Yet another DOJ visit in June sought (and got) the "voluntary" return of yet more records.

This time, though, Trump swore that was all he had. The New York Times reports that a Trump lawyer "signed a written statement in June [after the DOJ visit] asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government".

It's clear from the NYT piece, which lays out the history of the interactions between the Trump team and DOJ, that the government tried repeatedly to get Trump to cooperate voluntarily.

So when it became clear he still illegally held records after the June visit, it also became clear that he could not be trusted to comply with the law on his own.

His most ardent supporters will say he made a mistake. While that's hard to believe given what we know, it doesn't matter if they're right because it doesn't matter why he didn't return everything when informed of his "mistake" months ago. The bottom line is, he didn't, and neither the law nor the public is required to give him unlimited at-bats. It was time for the professionals to get the job done.

For the umpteenth time, let me ask ardent Trump supporters to picture a different scenario. Suppose Barack Obama had been found to hold dozens of boxes of sensitive and classified information from his time in office in his basement. When asked nicely to return them, he only sent back about half. Multiple followup visits revealed more material each time. Would you be willing to extend to him the courtesy of asking nicely forever? Of course not. You'd assume that he willfully failed to comply. Ex-president or no, you'd have no patience for an apparent willful disregard for the law.

(Trump, incidentally, has made the incendiary claim that Obama did take a ton of records, illegally, when he left office. The National Archives has flatly declared Obama did not do that. If you take the word of a serial liar like Trump over that of the National Archives — which, if pressed, will back up its statements under oath, something Trump has shown a marked disinclination to do — then we can't have a real discussion because you live in an alternate reality. I hope you find your way back to the real world.)

(By the way, the Republican politicians vehemently condemning the FBI, DOJ, and Attorney General Merrick Garland know all of this. The likes of Kevin McCarthy, who are threatening retribution against Garland and DOJ if Republicans take back the House in November, are contemptible, snivelling Trump toadies unfit to hold office.)

So, Trump illegally, willfully, and tenaciously held onto many documents from his time as president.

The big, hairy, unanswered question is, why?

The best case he could make for himself would be disorganization: "I had all this crud lying around the White House the night before the movers were due, so I ran around just dumping it into boxes. I figured I'd sort it out later."

It's an amusing image, to be sure, but do you buy it? I don't.

Trump's known for tearing up and disposing of documents once he has read them. A man with such a distaste for paperwork wouldn't burden himself with dozens of boxes of it, even if he never had to lift even one of those boxes himself. That is, he wouldn't burden himself with it unless he thought it would be worth his while.

Mar-a-Lago is visited by all sorts of people. While Trump was president, Mar-a-Lago was visited by a woman, a foreign citizen, bearing a thumb drive containing malware. Why did she attempt to enter? (She was stopped.) The obvious inference is that she was trying to spy — on Trump, his staff, and/or other guests — for her country.

Has anyone kept track of who has visited Mar-a-Lago since Trump left office?

The Secret Service's job is to protect Trump and his family from physical threats, not to safeguard whatever sensitive information might be on the premises. That information would only be as safe as Mar-a-Lago's private security could make it, and in any case, the information would be in Trump's apparent custody so he could do what he liked with it.

It's possible, then, that Trump has sold classified and/or sensitive information.

This is a staggeringly alarming possibility. It's one that we could not have imagined of any previous president. It's one that I frankly would rather not imagine even of Trump.

Yet an objective appraisal of Trump's behavior while in office (indeed, for his entire adult life) makes it impossible to discount that possibility. He has never hesitated to put his own interests above everyone else's. For example, it was unbelievably dangerous for him as president to have private talks with Vladimir Putin with no other American present, as he did at least once. (Putin's translator did double duty.) Subsequent to another Putin chat he confiscated the American translator's notes and forbade the translator to discuss the conversation. Those actions were not in the public interest; they endangered all of us by giving Putin incredible leverage over Trump. Trump has never explained why he acted with such breathtaking recklessness and indifference to the national interest.

Trump also, of course, engaged in more public and obvious displays of self-interest during his time in office, funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to his own businesses by, for instance, requiring the Secret Service to pay for accommodations at his properties. However, the Putin episodes demonstrated that Trump was perfectly willing to endanger the nation's security, too, if he thought it best suited him.

So we are faced with the real possibility that a former president of the United States knowingly and willfully sold, or wanted to sell, national-security secrets.

For all our sakes I hope he didn't. However, his behavior in office (and before) proved that he is selfish and immoral enough that the idea can't be disregarded.